It’s Official, Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s offer of a $44.6 billion buyout and Microsoft Responds. The NYTimes is reporting Yahoo’s stock has risen slightly in light of the rejection letter.

That means that investors appear confident that Yahoo is simply posturing to get a better deal from Microsoft (most likely) or someone else (if they can).

What does this mean for Google? Is Yahoo going to strike a deal with AOL? Keep up with the latest news on Yahoo and Microsoft in relation to this recent offer on the NYTimes Bits blog.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo, merger, aol

This time it’s actually true. Yesterday Microsoft made a $44.6 billion offer to acquire Yahoo! Google is by far the most dominant when it comes to online advertising. A deal like this, if accepted by Yahoo, could create a true competitor in the online advertising market. Here’s what Eric Sconfeld over at TechCruch came up with to show how a Microsoft – Yahoo merger would compared to Google.

The real question may be what will happen with each of the properties owned by Yahoo and Microsoft if the two companies combine. Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort behind their new “live” branded properties, including many still under development. Both companies have their own media players, search engines, email, photo sharing, etc. Duncan Riley from TechCrunch gives his take on what will happen to some of the major products in the event of a merger.

In my opinion this seems like it would create a company too large but on the other hand it could create great competition in the online world. Yahoo just recently announced 1,000 layoffs, could Microsoft be the company to get Yahoo properties back on track? So when it comes down to it I guess I don’t really have much of an opinion yet, I can see the goods and bads that could come out of this merger. We’ll just have to wait and see when and if the deal actually goes through, I hear News Corp (Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate) is now also scrambling for a bid.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo, merger

Fresh out of Google Labs comes the free GOOG-411 service. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) into your phone from anywhere in the US, say your location and what you’re looking for and Google will connect you with the business you choose for free.

Check out the GOOG-411 homepage and watch their short video on how the service works. They also have a FAQ page with an easy description of how to use GOOG-411. Can’t beat a free 411 service.

Blogged with Flock

Technorati Tags: google, free+411, 411, free

They guys at “The Common Craft Show” use pen and paper to explain things in “plain english” and they do a great job! You don’t have to be technical to understand their videos and keep up with what’s going on out there on the Web these days.

Their latest video (Google Docs in Plain English) explains how easy it can be to maintain a single document with multiple editors in different locations. Anyone who has had to do this knows how tough it can be to manage multiple copies of the same document and keep track the latest updates. Check out this video to see just how Google Docs can make your life easier, especially after the recently released presentation (Powerpoint) addition to the already present Docs (Word) and Spreadsheets (Excel).

Technorati Tags: google+docs, software, online+office

Here’s a little search tip for you:

Imagine your doing some research for your boss and you remember reading this perfect reference article that would allow you to complete the research in no time an meet your deadline. You could remember the address to the home page of the website (websiteExample.com) where you read this article but can’t can’t for the life of you seem to remember the articles title. You spend hours and hours browsing through the confusing navigational links and even tried using the sites search feature only to come out empty handed and very frustrated, it seems there article has just disappeared! Now what do you do?

Most likely go to your favorite search engine (possibly google.com) and begin searching for new articles that may not have all of the information you need. If only you could use the power of Google.com with a few keywords you remember from the article to search the entire websiteExample.com website, and only websiteExample.com site, to quickly and easily find the article you’re looking for. You could quickly print it out and make it to your daughters ballet show on time!

You can do exactly that by simply using the “site:” keyword! Using your search query with the “site:” keyword followed by the address of a website tells Google to only return results that match your search query from the website address you entered. i.e. “MySearchWords site:exampleWebsite.com”. Here’s an example of how this feature recently saved me hours or research.

My coworkers and I knew there was an article on appDeploy.com that told how to get around being forced to start an MSI installation using the setup.exe. Searching for this article on appdeploy.com proved to be rather difficult. But by simply searching appDeploy.com using the Google search engine we were able to find the exact article in a matter of seconds. To do this we used the query “setup.exe” followed by the “site:” keyword and then the appDeploy.com address: “Setup.exe site:appdeploy.com“. Google returned results only from the appDeploy.com website and the first result on this page was actually the exact article we were looking for: “Getting Around MSI Packages That Require Setup.exe“.

Other sample searches:

• antispyware site:www.ComputersConfuseMe.com
• Map Services site:http://techcrunch.com
• Canon DSLR site:dpreview.com

Give this tip a try the next time you’re having trouble re-locating an article on a website, I sure you’ll find it a huge time saver.

Technorati Tags: google, search, tip, site